Frustrating! Just Use iPhone’s Built-in Podcasts App – Hourly News Review

I can’t believe I took so long to give up on this app and just start playing news on my podcasts app. I used this app for at least a year, and it frustrated me every morning. ▪️When connection is too slow to support the podcast (which happens FAR more often than when I use iPhone’s built-in Podcasts or any other app), it doesn’t simply stop, to start up again when the connection catches up (which makes sense and is the feature for almost any audio or video stream you’d normally access). Instead, it either rolls automatically to the next source or stops completely and goes back to the beginning of the current source. ▪️When that happens, good luck trying to find the point 2.5 minutes into the source you were listening to. The tiny(!) slide that controls your progress in the source is completely insensitive to touch control, either refusing to respond at all or jumping much much further than you’d ever indicated. The size of the slide controller alone is a very basic UI design fail for an app whose sole purpose is user convenience. ▪️The lack of control over progress through each source means that you have to sit through commercials, and, if you didn’t completely absorb what was just said, there’s no going back. Meanwhile, the Podcasts app has had a simple 15-second jump so that you can easily skip over commercials and have them repeat the last tiny bit. ▪️There’s no longer any way to get BBC’s hourly news anywhere but the BBC iPlayer Radio app, so you’ll end up bouncing between apps anyway to get decent world news coverage. ▪️They haven’t updated in about half a year. I feel like this app is gonna be abandoned & go to seed very soon.
Review by thesuperalice on Hourly News.